The night before the opening of Faust, I was as anxious as one of my cast. I kept a terror that the shah would find a way into my show. After all, he had made mention of its performance as if he wanted to add his own drama. And so I had taken care to position guards during final dress rehearsal, ready for any danger that could erupt in a theatre full of people. My employees had spied me giving my new armed employees instructions and obviously considered I’d lost my mind, and perhaps they weren’t far off. Anxiety had such an effect, and I was a tightly-wound ball of it, leaping at every sound that wasn’t the background of Faust’s score, terrified the second I calmed would be the second my world altered.
Perhaps that was why when Christine came home with me that night, she dove at me with wild abandon, tearing at clothes with fingers urgent for the scarred flesh beneath and pressing fervent lips to every feature of my face to steal the very words of protest from my mouth. She seemed tenaciously set in her plan to distract me, and it was so well-executed that I forgot everything for as long as desire held.
Hands and mouths, tongue plunging deep and tasting inch after inch of heated skin; we both burned alive in the wanting, coming to each other at the cusp of its waves and riding out each undulation to its fulfillment. Our bodies entwined and made a music more glorious than the stage could hold, moving as one in that choreographed dance as old as time itself, and love was the sacred shroud spread atop us, blocking out any evil that tried to graze our hearts.
Afterward as I lay curled behind her, still so deeply embedded in her heated wetness, she whispered into the comfort of shadows, “I’m nervous about the opening.”
It was almost humorous that in all the drama with the shah and potential imprisonment, I hadn’t considered such a thing. “Nervous? But you’ve done this before and often.”
“Yes, but every performance since that first Gala night has been contrived and hollow. You said it yourself: I was an automaton whose wind-up key was turned, but now…you took the walls down and it will just be me on the stage, exposed and vulnerable and with my harshest critic to please.”
Kissing her temple, I vowed adamantly, “You’ve already pleased me…quite well, in fact.” My teasing earned me the little giggle I was after, and I eagerly added, “You forget that this heart-revealing sort of performance is what you were born to do. You will shine and sparkle upon that stage tomorrow night; I’ve no doubt of it.”
“If I do, it will be for you, ange, all for you.” She took a trembling breath; I felt it lift the arm I had fitted about her torso. “Erik, …I know you’re afraid for both of us, but I cannot stand to see how heavily it weighs upon your thoughts. I beg you to remember that you love the music, that that is why we take risks and chances. Music always meant so much to you, and now…”
“There is no music in a dungeon cell, Christine,” I reminded solemnly. “Only what plays in memory, and it is disappointing at best. I would rather put protecting you above loving the music for the moment. I can appreciate such things when I know I’m free.”
She peeked back over her shoulder at me and shook her head, stirring disheveled dark curls upon her pillowcase. “Have I taught you nothing? Foolish man. What good is there in living if we cannot appreciate our blessings? You will fixate on the risks and chances not taken instead of savor the ones right before you, and tomorrow night will be a blurred haze in your memory. You love music; don’t let fear for what may or may not come to pass steal that from you.” Her little hand cupped my scarred cheek and lovingly trailed its deformations. “There will always be situations where we cannot predict the outcome, but if you allow the fear to outweigh the pleasure, then…life is empty. I know it’s true because I lived a year and a half dead inside and unable to see the world beyond my pains and trepidations. And now…don’t waste our bliss together with your own terrors in between us.”
I wanted to argue that what I did had merit, that obsessing over her well-being was necessary, but at the heart of every contention, I knew she was right. Since the shah’s appearance, I felt as if I’d been grasping happiness with slipping fingers, and my zeal to cling to it meant suffocation. I was more concerned with keeping happiness than feeling it. I vowed to myself at that second with her in my embrace, her heartbeat practically aligned with mine, that I would listen to her, and tomorrow night when she triumphed, I would share her joy with her. Joy not terror of what could be. The present should mean more than the future.
With that new mindset, I went about final details for the opening the next day, bustling about my office while the performers were tended to in their dressing rooms. I was even lighthearted and humming Faust’s final duet to myself as I went through a stack of bills upon my desk, sharing a bit of Christine’s performance excitement. I could hardly wait to see her upon the stage!
A knock at the door jarred me from my fantasies of her voice, and as I called, “Come in,” I harbored a hope to find her beaming smile behind the door. It was a meager disappointment to find the daroga instead.
“Yes?” I tersely snapped as he closed himself inside. “If you can’t tell by the bustle about the opera, it’s opening night, and I am quite busy.”
“Too busy for a report on our old acquaintance, the shah?” the daroga asked with suspicious, arched brows.
“I don’t want to worry about him today. I have guards about, ready to attack if necessary, and it will be left at that. I’m tired of fighting an invisible battle. Christine is right to say I’ve been obsessing over imaginary evils instead of living my life. So any news you have can wait until after the opening.”
“But…I know where the shah has been staying.”
“Oh?” I didn’t want to care, but his comment piqued my interest when I longed to stay two steps ahead.
The daroga’s snide look seemed to insist he knew I’d falter to revenge’s curiosity, and he obliged me. “Using my sleuth skills, a bit rusty for lack of employment, I found that he and his men rented a rather large, luxurious room at one of the most elite hotels in the city. And…well, this doesn’t say much for my detective tactics, but they haven’t really been hiding such information. They’ve been spending and gambling all over the city. It’s almost as if the shah wanted us to find him. Why do you imagine that would be?”
I shrugged with feigned apathy. “I’ll analyze it with you tomorrow, but I’m not supposed to care tonight, remember?”
I meant it now that I had the information, and I would have extradited him from my office if not for the next knock at my door. All my assertions were null and void in one sentence from a flustered costume girl.
“Mademoiselle Daaé is gone.”
Gone… Gone… Gone… The word whirled in a vortex, repeating its solitary syllable in my mind a dozen times before I comprehended what it meant. Gone… Christine was gone.
I ran to her dressing room without a word, the daroga chasing behind. I couldn’t breathe; breathing felt like it would stir the earth too much, and stagnant air burned my lungs and choked me as I searched even the corners of the small confines. No Christine…
“Perhaps she’s lingering about with some of her comrades,” the daroga offered, but I heard his voice tremble and knew he had the same thoughts I did. No, she wasn’t with friends or the obnoxious ballerinas. She was taken. I knew it, intuitive and undoubting, and the note the daroga found upon her vanity was no surprise.
“ ‘Her or you’,” he read aloud and then glanced at me with solemn, anxious eyes. “Erik, what are we going to do?”
I felt sick on a potent tonic of rage and fear, but in the midst, I gasped out, “It’s opening night. She cannot miss curtain.”
“I think we have larger problems than a botched show-”
“No, that is just one more problem. I’m doubtless it’s an extra feather in the shah’s turban to destroy my theatre as well as my life. Bastard! And so help me God, if he lays one finger upon Christine, I will cut it off!” As emotion spiraled, I hung my head in my hands for a long inhalation and sough
t the path to rational sense. It was there, buried somewhere beneath hysteria, and when I found it, I chided my own stupidity not to have realized right away. “I know what to do.”
“What?”
“Come on.”
We rushed out of the opera house and onto the Paris streets. I was fueled with the pulsation of retribution. The shah would pay for this. No one touched what was mine.
“Erik, where are we going?”
“There is only one person who can help me,” I insisted and picked up my pace until the daroga had to jog to keep up.
“Who?”
But I gave him no answer as the houses grew larger and more expensive in this part of the city. I did not explain or hesitate. I found the one I wanted and hurried up the walkway to the front door, pounding furiously on its surface without an inkling of patience left.
A frazzled maid answered, her eyes widening to survey a masked man and a foreigner on the doorstep, but as she gasped, the very presence I sought joined her at the threshold and gripped the door in a fierce hand.
“What do you want? You are not welcome here,” the Vicomte de Chagny snapped, hatred in his turquoise gaze.
But I was not above swallowing my pride, and with as much earnestness as I could muster, I bid, “I need your help.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Christine~
The most terrifying moment of my life was emerging from a delightful dream of soaring with angels and finding myself in an entirely strange and unknown room. With an inaudible gasp, I scanned the opulent surroundings and desperately sought to recall my last memories.
I’d been at the opera, waiting in my dressing room for my costume girl… Oh God… They’d come through the door almost kindly as if they hadn’t wanted to cause panic and damage. The shah’s guards…and they must have drugged me. The last I could remember was falling to darkness.
As I abruptly sat up on a chaise, my head gave a pirouette, and I pressed my hand to my brow and sought to hold it in one position. Drugged definitely. In the center of the haze came one doubtless thought: I was ruining opening night, and Erik was going to fly into a rage in my absence.
“Ah good, you’re awake.”
I went stiff with that voice and peeked through my fingers at the hated, smiling face of the shah of Persia.
“You…you took me from the opera house,” I stated as I weakly lowered my hands to my lap and fixed him in my stare, seeking to sound less affected by such news than I was. “It’s opening night. How dare you?”
The shah chuckled, and his beady eyes raked over me and made me shudder in anxious disgust. “What obstinacy in you! If I were you, I’d be a bit more worried about your well-being than a silly stage show.”
“Silly?” I posed and narrowed my glare.
“Well, of course! Children playing pretend before an audience. I respect the talent, but I consider the medium overdone. Now if I put my pretty nightingale in a golden cage and had her sing for me alone in my bedchamber, that would be something far more valuable.”
My arms wove protectively about my body as I tried to shield myself from his penetrating stare. “You had no right to take me,” I insisted and sought to keep a waver from my voice. “Erik is going to kill you.”
“Your disfigured lover has been an absolute humiliation to my rule. Did he tell you?” The shah plopped into an armchair facing me and acted as if this conversation was casually ordinary. “Once the pride of my regime, a killer with a heart of stone and a penchant for perverse suffering to rival mine. He built me torture chambers in his genius, sent insurgents to suffer, murdered on my whim. But…when it grew stale, he double-crossed me, fled the country with a nice sum from my treasury in his pockets. He made me look a fool, and no one makes me look a fool without consequence and punishment.”
“So you tortured him,” I spat back and did not regret my aggression.
“In every heinous way imaginable,” the shah confirmed without a flicker of remorse. “It was justly deserved. He should have died, but he had this unending hope of returning to you. You were his saving grace. How pathetic! He wouldn’t let go of an existence full of unfathomable pain and degradation because he longed for you. And now I’ve taken you away, and we shall see how fast he crumbles and resigns to further torment to save you.”
I didn’t speak, afraid he was right. Erik would do anything for me, but I’d rather not verify that to the evil mastermind devising torturous deaths.
“So now, dear Christine, we simply wait for the moth to come to the flame. I expect him at anytime; he isn’t a patient one. And then we’ll see what happens. Perhaps I’ll take you both back to Persia with me. I have quite the harem, but fair-skinned beauties are a delicacy in my country. They’re not nearly tough enough to last. The few I’ve had in my services chose suicide after only one excursion in my bed. Evidently, they were not accustomed to the derision of pleasure from pain. …I feel sure you could learn. If you let a revolting freak with the face of a demon between your legs, surely you have some dark layers to you.”
He licked his lips, slow and provocative, and I fought tears that threatened to give my real terror away.
“…Perhaps I should offer you a taste now.”
He started to rise, and I contemplated the struggle I was determined to put forth. He was a large man; I feared I had no hope of triumph when in comparison, I looked like a little girl. Thankfully, I never had to test my abilities. A knock at the door had the shah huffing his annoyance and rushing to answer.
I knew we both assumed it would be Erik, and I felt my chest constrict in anticipation and terror. But one of the guards stood uncomfortably before his master, glancing to my observing eyes before making his report.
“Sire, …we have a visitor I think you will want to see.”
The shah sneered but nodded consent, and a gasp fled my lips as our ‘guest’ entered the room with eyes that sought mine first, perusing my shape as if in desperate need to make certain I was well. I wasn’t sure if I should be grateful or completely confused, but it felt so wonderful to see a familiar face, even if not the malformed one I wanted.
“Excuse my intrusion, my good sir,” Raoul stated, flat and with a haughtiness I’d never heard from him. “I don’t know how things are run in your country, but here we do not carry off claimed women against their will. It is uncouth and unacceptable. I demand the release of Mademoiselle Daaé this instant, or you will have the gendarme banging down your door and hauling you to prison for kidnapping!”
The shah looked Raoul over, obviously finding nothing worthy of worry in the threat. “And who are you to speak with such authority? I see nothing but a pathetic boy.”
Narrowing his glare, Raoul replied, “I am the Vicomte de Chagny. Perhaps titles below shah mean nothing in your country. But here I have the law on my side, especially considering that you have my fiancée under your locked guard.”
My gaze widened a bit with his assertion, but I offered no protest, not a single word. I just prayed Erik knew what he was doing with this plan.
“Your fiancée?” the shah inquired, scrutinizing me in his dubiousness. “I was under the distinct impression that the young lady was involved with the one you call the Opera Ghost.”
Raoul scoffed against him. “Are you out of your mind? The ‘Opera Ghost’ is obsessed with Christine; we barely escaped his dastardly plot to force her hand. He has had her in his eye of infatuation for years and will not accept the truth: that Christine does not want him back. She chose me.”
“But…I saw them together. He was protecting her.” Every argument the shah made was met with a denial from Raoul, every query constructed with an answer, and I would have been astounded if I could have broken character.
“No, that was another pathetic attempt to win her heart,” the Vicomte arrogantly stated. “Don’t you see? The ‘Opera Ghost’ is as much a thorn in my side as yours. He tried to kill me to gain Christine willingly as his once. He put an ultimatum at her feet to be his wi
fe or watch me die. So I have no qualms against your vendetta. Take him back to Persia to fester in your jails, but you will not enact your war with Christine as bait and prize. She is mine, and if you think you can come in and carry her off no better than that madman, I will have every branch of law enforcement in France pursue you.”
The shah seemed to be weighing Raoul’s fabricated words; I was half-amazed by the details devised in a makeshift story about kidnapping and ultimatums, but as I met the Vicomte’s steady stare and saw his worried affection, it hurt because I knew the motive behind it was real. He genuinely loved me still and would face shahs and officials to attempt to be my hero. But…considering Erik was the genius behind the curtain, it was hard to dub only one of the two as hero-worthy.
“Vicomte, your presence takes me by surprise,” the shah sneered in his thick accent. “This girl may be your fiancée, but she’s also the key to Erik’s destruction. If I simply let her go, I am doing a great disservice to my cause. He didn’t break under the worst tortures imaginable with this girl in his heart. Handing her back to you means nothing for me.”
The Vicomte looked livid as he strode to my side and grabbed my hand, pulling me off the chaise and to my feet. “So burn him alive, stick a sword in his gut, drown him. I don’t care! This monster has done his damnedest to ruin our future; I will not let him win. You can find your own methods to the demon’s end, but Christine will not be a part of it. Come on, darling.”
I curled tight to Raoul’s side and played the role of damsel in distress, for the first time grateful for its facets and my supposed savior.
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